Europe and the Myth of the Racialized Sexual Predator: Gendered and Sexualized Patterns of Prejudice
The Rise of the “Rapefugee”
It is sexual terrorism, a sexual jihad, and it happens everywhere in Europe […], everywhere where the red carpet is laid out for these testosterone bombs. (Wilders 2016)
“Testosterone bombs.” This is how Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch radical-Right Freedom Party, and never shy for sweeping racist charges, spoke of Muslim immigrants in 2016. In a statement posted on YouTube, Wilders called for a Muslim immigration ban in order to stop what he referred to as a “rape epidemic.” Pending such a ban, he proposed locking all male asylum seekers in reception centers. Wilders published his statement in the wake of the 2015-2016 New Year’s Eve events in the city of Cologne, when groups of men robbed and sexually assaulted hundreds of women (De Hart 2007). Much has been written about the events, with many conflicting accounts of what happened—notably about the numbers of perpetrators and victims involved—or about the organized or spontaneous character of the mob. But a few things are consistent: many women were sexually assaulted that night, the perpetrators were described as North African or Arab, and moral panic surrounded the event. The moral panic, however, was not so much about the vexed question of sexual violence at large, but rather, about the presence of racialized men in the cities of Europe. As public narratives and frames on what had happened were elaborated, the spotlight turned to these men racialized as non-white and not belonging to Europe, qualified alternately as migrants, Muslims, or refugees. While a sexualized fear for refugees had been brewing, both in the mainstream media and on the streets, the moral panic following the sexual assaults in Cologne cemented the central role of a new figure which PEGIDA would rapidly baptize as the “rapefugee” (Bracke and Hernandez Aguilar 2020).
https://www.europenowjournal.org/2020/12/07/europe-and-the-myth-of-the-racialized-sexual-predator-gendered-and-sexualized-patterns-of-prejudice/